This is a strikingly original performance, opting for melancholic introspection, and freshly imagined detail, over the usual alpha-male Sturm und Drang. The nuances are equally delicate in Beethoven's piano sonata No 28 in A, Op 101.

The French pianist Hélène Grimaud clearly feels the music she performs very deeply, as is evidenced by her transported facial expressions whenever she plays . . . Grimaud lacks nothing in power, intensity or technical finesse . . . one encounters a sense of fantasy . . .

. . . a big, large-boned interpretation, with good attention to Beethoven's articulation and slurring . . . In the slow movement . . . Grimaud plays her part expressively . . . The final Rondo is very present . . . one mustn't forget the A major Sonata, Op. 101, which completes the disc . . . One senses that somewhere within Hélène Grimaud there is a genuine questing artist.

Record Review /
Stephen Pruslin,
International Record Review (London) / 01. October 2007

This is without question the best recording that Hélène Grimaud has made for DG. The opening "Emperor" gushes forth like a sparkling fountain, at a freshly invigorating basic tempo. Give credit to Vladimir Jurowski for his excellent collaboration, and to a Staatskapelle Dresden that really stays on top of its collective toes. Grimaud even manages to make something special out of those upward scales that so often signal the pianist's entrances and exits . . . it's a fleeting memory at best, and the finale goes with all of the joyful enthusiasm that anyone could ask. If anything, the sonata is even finer . . . she simply plays really well, stylishly but with plenty of poetry too. The inner movements are particularly memorable: an alla Marcia full of rhythmic point and a truly cantabile adagio whose "affetto" never degenerates into mannerism. Grimaud potentially is one of the finest pianists in the business, and let's hope this release signals for her a new level of maturity and artistic depth. The sonics, by the way, are also very good, with Grimaud's piano particularly well-caught, and not too much performance noise. Impressive!

Record Review /
David Hurwitz,
ClassicsToday.com / 18. October 2007

All of the thrust and grandeur he brings to the Russian repertoire is heard here . . . The star of the disc is Helene Grimaud, and rightly so: She usually has a firm intellectual and technical grasp on whatever she's performing, and that's particularly the case here. It's penetrating, dry-eyed Beethoven rendered with such technical clarity that you realize there's even more to the piece than what usually meets the ears.

. . . these two new recordings . . . demonstrate just why he's one of the most acclaimed 35-year-olds in classical music. Mr. Jurowski leads the Staatskapelle Dresden as pianist Hélène Grimaud leaps ferociously into the Emperor Concerto. The orchestral playing is at once majestic and aerated, as if a massive block of granite had been pierced with thousands of holes to let in the light. The initial tempo isn't particularly fast, but things slow down and speed up frequently, always with a smoothness and emotional certainty displaying the young conductor's mastery of line. Ms. Grimaud plays with a beautiful tone . . . She does a good job with Beethoven's Sonata No. 28, too, a nice fit for her basically lyrical impulse.

Hélène Grimaud's performances on this disc . . . are truly fantastic. Her technique is essentially untouchable and her tone is surprisingly colorful. And, as in her previous recordings, her interpretations are outrageous. With Vladimir Jurowski and the Dresden Staatskapelle in the "Concerto," Grimaud is unafraid to do whatever she wants with balance and tempos. And alone in the "Sonata," she is even more audacious, bending, shaping, sculpting the music with no restraint applied except her own taste . . . Grimaud's willfulness matches the composer's own broad streak of ornery individuality, and her sensual shapes and malleable tempos do the same. Jurowski gets the Dresden Staatskapelle to follow where Grimaud leads in the "Concerto," and the results in both cases are perhaps the most persuasive recording of the pianist's career. Deutsche Grammophon's sound is exceptional.

Record Review /
James Leonard,
Barnes & Noble / 07. November 2007

. . . this "Emperor" has much to recommend it. Tempos are well chosen, the orchestra is refreshingly transparent, the winds and brass cutting through colorfully, the strings crisp in articulation and superbly balanced, revealing important secondary detail not always captured in studio accounts. Moreover, Grimaud is technically accomplished, handling the music's virtuosic demands with seeming ease . . . in terms of sound, the recording is astonishingly realistic . . . Grimaud certainly makes sense and raises curiosity about how she might approach some of the other sonatas.

A Philosopher At The Piano

Hélène Grimaud has recorded Beethoven's “Emperor" Concerto and confronts in her interpretation our present-day chaos.

The French pianist Hélène Grimaud is one of the most sagacious of today's keyboard artists - a philosopher at the concert grand. Now she has taken on one of the greatest works of the piano literature, Beethoven's “Emperor" Concerto. The result is a major event. Without pathos Grimaud delivers the contemporary update on a classic. She gives you thoughts, reflections and ideas instead of blood, sweat and tears. And yet the last piano concerto of the Bonn master, in her hands, is a work of musical extremes, a journey of the soul through the vales of worldly despair and over the peaks of ideologies. A musical journey to a world viewed from a melancholic interior, time-travelling from Beethoven's to ours. She makes music into one of the great struggles of our time.

Sound for Hélène Grimaud is space for thought - a place where everything is possible. It also means taking the world apart in order to put it back together in a new form. And that's precisely what she does, while remaining true to her idol Ludwig van Beethoven. There is no composer who described the current zeitgeist better than he did, none who went as far in extending existing formal boundaries in order to describe the struggle between the individual and the world order.

Following a concert, the musician explains why the composer is one of her heroes: “He had to struggle with the problem of living at a time of discord, riven with disruption and contradiction. Truths that held one day were already passé the next. But none of that prevented Beethoven, ill, nearly deaf, from holding fast to his musical universalism. He was ready to overturn old forms and conventions in order to find new ones. It was not the world that was 'out of joint', but the language used to make sense of it." For Grimaud, this is the real challenge of Beethoven for our time: the doubting individual views a world gone awry. To bring it back under control Beethoven needed music.

“One can hear the struggle in Beethoven's compositions, his wrestling with every note, with every chord. He conceived the world in a way that I find absolutely contemporary, not to say modern. We too live in a world that we can hardly comprehend, one in which confusion exceeds our grasp of its overriding complexities. We too are desperately longing to give form to this world. Beethoven showed us that working to repair the fissures and flaws in human existence can result in beautiful music. He strove for a heaven on earth. He was always prepared to stand the world on its head."

For a long time, Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto was interpreted as a heroic battle painting. Of course, Grimaud also hears galloping horses and the carnage of battle in the “Emperor" Concerto, and of course it also represents for her a piece of contemporary history - not a historical illustration of the past but rather of “philosophy cast in music, a philosophy that sets out to neutralize human contradictions". And this calls for a show of strength.

“Beethoven is one of the most fascinating of all period-spanning composers", says Grimaud. “Of course he was formed by the classical figures of the Viennese School, he not only brought their ideas to culmination, especially in the Fifth Piano Concerto, but also broke new ground." This development can also be heard in the Sonata op. 101, dedicated to Beethoven's pupil Dorothea von Ertmann, which Grimaud has chosen to complement the concerto.

Beethoven in his symphonies and piano concertos has fused the private with the political, the internal with the external, and it is this individualized, almost literary view of the single human being in the world that fascinates the pianist: “When you read Beethoven's letters, you get to know someone with misanthropic tendencies, who often reacted brusquely and rudely, who was easily disillusioned and offended by others - but, at the same time, in his sensibility, developed an incredible strength. Even as questionable as Beethoven's behaviour may at times have seemed, he firmly believed that things could also be different - that they could be better. His music is marked by these assertions and disappointments, and by an endless sense of hope. He formulated the ambivalence of every individual - and because of that Beethoven's music reaches us."

Something genuinely new in her Beethoven interpretations is Grimaud's handling of the composer's effects, which for her are never an end in themselves but extreme pronouncements: “I think that the real idea of Beethoven's music is found where the extremes collide", she says. “It's not about hollow pathos or empty, unquestioningly marching heroism, not about misanthropic melancholy or a concomitant world-weariness." Grimaud in her interpretations prefers to listen for the overtones, to expound theses in order immediately to develop antitheses.

Monumentality in her playing is entirely subjugated to the search for meaning. “The piano concerto is like a beast", says Grimaud, “for whom one has incredible respect. You study it - and in the end this beast reveals itself as a teacher. As a teacher who challenges you to consider things for yourself, who, through the overwhelming form the interpreter has to deal with, forces one to reflect on one's own contradictions and bring them into an individual form - to transcend one's own limits and toss old preconceptions overboard. Beethoven compels the artist to acquire knowledge, because in his music the emotional is developed out of philosophical logic. With emotion alone, one doesn't get very far."

When you hear Grimaud's “Emperor", the work's heroic attributes take on a new significance. For this pianist, heroes aren't found on the battlefield. Her heroes attempt to bring order to the world as they find it. To save the world, they call themselves into question. Grimaud's new Beethoven also represents the birth of a wise new hero.